In the 1930s, Peter Arno’s dowagers and Monopoly men stick figures railed against FDR. But today, it’s the left who are now America’s Ruling Class. They don’t enjoy having their walled-off worldview violated; and expect their servants, whether on TV or in print, to defend against any attacks that bubble-up from below.
As Mike Meyers’ Dr. Evil character once told Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers character, there’s nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster, and those who strike the pose of “cool” often age very, very badly indeed, eventually becoming the old guard they themselves used to parody. No one will confuse David Letterman with Bob Hope, but as Mark Steyn wrote in 2003, shortly before Hope passed away after reaching his centennial, there was a time in the early part of his career when Hope almost singlehandedly invented the modern stand-up comic style, much the same way that Letterman reinvented the talk show:
Success on that scale breeds a particular kind of contempt. Younger comics who for 30 years have despised Hope as a pro-war establishment suck-up forget that he more or less invented the form they work in: the relaxed guy who strolls on and does topical observational gags about the world we live in. When he started eight decades ago, there were no “stand-ups”; it was an age of clowns – weird-looking guys in goofy costumes taking frenzied pratfalls and telling ethnic gags in stage dialects – German, Irish, Negro.
But forty years later, Hope became out of touch with the times, and it cost him, badly, dating him as a man of the past:
He only put his foot wrong once. He was the American everyman and he wanted to be every man’s American, fun for young and old alike. But Vietnam placed huge strains on that notion of a universal popular culture. For the first time in his career, Hope had to choose sides and it wasn’t so much that he chose wrong but the way he chose. “Students are revolting all over the world,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re revolting about, I just know they’re revolting.” The limitations of his technique – of being a frontman for a factory of joke generators – were suddenly exposed. The reliable formulae, the old portable puns sounded sour and small-minded. Unimaginably, the guy who’d always been one step ahead of the times was behind the times. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon can complain about the way “speaking out” on Iraq is hurting their careers, but Hope’s a sharper example of how taking sides can change public perception: in a late Sixties poll of American high schools’ favourite entertainers, he came second to the Beatles. By the time the war ended, he’d lost that generation forever.
In the Depression, Herbert Hoover ran for re-election on the slogan “Prosperity’s Just Around The Corner”. On stage, Hope said he’d run into a lady in the lobby. “She said, ‘Young man, could you tell me where I could find the rest room?’ And I said, ‘It’s just around the corner.’ ‘Don’t give me that Hoover talk,’ she said. ‘I gotta go.’” That’s a perfect Hope gag: genially pointed – exactly where he wanted to be. After Vietnam, he never quite recovered his timing. In the 1988 Presidential election, he thought Dukakis “sounded like something you step in”. HIV? “Did you hear the Statue of Liberty has Aids? She’s not sure whether she caught it from the mouth of the Hudson [the river that runs along Manhattan’s west sure] or the Staten Island ferry [pronounced “fairy”].” Hope isn’t “homophobic’ – his closest professional confidante these days is a lesbian daughter – but he couldn’t seem to get his groove back. In transforming himself into a one-man laugh corporation, he’d blunted his own comedic instincts.
That last line is key. David Letterman arrived at a time when the TV talk show was a moribund institution. As hip and cool as Carson was, the structure of his show — and all of the talk shows that mindlessly imitated it — seemed permanently trapped around the era of Mad Men. By the early 1980s, it had become petrified. When Carson passed away in early 2005, James Lileks wrote:
Lost in all the eulogies this week, I think, will be recognition of how unhip the Tonight Show was for a while. Not Lawrence-Welk unhip; it always had enough residual Vegas swank to keep it from becoming a relic from the grandpa demographic. But what had seemed cosmopolitan and urbane to a kid was fossilized and irrelevant to the know-it-all 18 year old. Everything had changed for you, but nothing had changed for them. The drunk jokes. Hi-yo. Doc’s fashion sense. Remarks about the band’s wild ways, or Tommy Newsome’s impassivity. Ed fargin’ Ames throwing the tomahawk – was it funny because he planted it the yarbles, or because it resembled homo erectus? Both? That was still funny, but you had to sit through a lot to get there. Get out of your car, cut off your Slausen – if you smiled at that, it was because you remembered how cool you felt the first time you knew that line was coming. But it wasn’t hip. Saturday Night Live was hip. SNL was now and the Tonight Show was most definitely then. Carson always did that golf swing. No one you knew golfed.
Letterman’s show, debuting in the early 1980s, was the perfect antidote, grafting the sensibility of SNL onto the talk show format, bridging the gap between the post-’60s Saturday Night Live and the postmodern Seinfeld.
But as Anne Beatts, a writer on the first iteration of Saturday Night Live once quipped, “you can only be avant-garde for so long, before you become garde.” And as with Bob Hope and the Vietnam war, Letterman was equally flustered by Iraq. Hope would have been around 64 during the Tet Offensive; Letterman was about 59 when he told Bill O’Reilly in late 2006 he wasn’t sure if he wanted America to win in Iraq:
In now a famous “You Tube” moment, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, went on Letterman to be the recipient of the host’s rude and sophomoric antics. As the segment shifted into high gear, O’Reilly asked Letterman a pointed and direct question: “Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?”To the surprise of no one but his sycophants, Letterman could not or would not answer the question. When pressed by O’Reilly to answer, the best he could do was to play to his mostly left-leaning audience for cheap debating points and say, “It’s not easy for me because I’m thoughtful.”
As I wrote back then:
How thoughtful do you need to be? it’s an A or B question: do you want the US to win, or Al Qaeda, the Baathists, and Iran? Letterman, who, 20 years ago, was once the master of postmodern irony, became its unintentional victim as he unwittingly echoed Jack Benny’s classic gag when he retorted to a fictional mugger shouting “Your money or life, pal!” on his old radio show: “I’m thinking it over!”
Which brings us to Letterman’s attack on Andrew Breitbart last night:
David Letterman, speaking to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on his show, asked about the Shirley Sherrod incident and took it upon himself to slam Andrew Breitbart. At one point during the interview he asked her “how much time, energy was wasted on this a*shole ****ing around?”
Maddow described Breitbart as a “spinoff from Matt Drudge, from the Drudge Report.” Breitbart, indeed, used to serve as an editor of the Drudge Report, but her intentions in mentioning the Drudge Report probably amount to the effectiveness of the site to sway public debate– not to mention millions of viewers visiting per day. Two targets for the price of one. After all, anyone from MSNBC at this point has to be pretty bitter due to their horrific ratings.
Of course, to no ones surprise, she continued to spew the lefts talking points on the matter, reaffirming to Dave that Fox News ran the story as “factual”– when, in fact, they didn’t run the story until after 9 p.m that night, as Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted Howard Dean on the same lies the mainstream media picked up and ran with. Any opportunity they get to attack Fox News and Conservatives, they utilize to the fullest.
We’ve reached a point where, while English still is the dominant language in the US, but it really doesn’t matter: the right and the left are speaking two entirely different languages, and the left simply cannot comprehend what is being said on the right. At some point around 2003 or 2004, when the pressure cooker burst, Letterman moved much further away from the center-left position that Carson held down so well for decades. You knew Carson was liberal, but he was fair, and became the gold standard for talk show hosts by allowing everyone in America to safely tune-in. With Letterman? Much like Saturday Night Live, if you don’t share his nihilistic worldview, you’re not wanted as part of his audience — and America knows it.
At Breitbart’s Big Hollywood site, editor John Nolte responds in a style that should be all too familiar to Letterman:
Top Ten Things We Learned From
David Letterman Trashing Andrew Breitbart
10. No one will ever say that David Letterman is “too smart to believe what he believes.”
9. Whatever was left of Dave’s edgy sense of irony died while engaging in a serious discussion about the ethics of journalism with… Rachel Maddow… of…. MSNBC…
8. Dave hasn’t figured out that “scaring smart people” puts your ratings in the toilet.
7. Dave will believe any lie told by a humorless partisan wearing purple glasses.
6. Two negatives do not equal a positive. Maddow’s inability to feel joy plus Letterman’s similar affliction equals less audience pleasure than a discussion about undercooked meatloaf between two nursing home residents.
5. Somehow the career of Johnny Carson’s former protege’ has hit so many classless lows that his calling someone a #$%*& $@#!& on national television doesn’t even rate.
4. Contrary to popular belief, for five minutes Dave is in fact able to restrain himself from leering over the words ”Palin” and “Sarah.” …and to not make jokes about the statutory rape of teenage girls.
3. The only time anyone notices Dave’s show is when he embarrasses himself.
2. Dave’s still cranky since learning Bill Clinton now narrowly leads in their contest to see which gray-haired old lefty can score the most intern tail.
1. I guess Andrew won’t be getting a personal tour of Letterman’s creepy Edgar Allen Poe off-office sex-with-employees room above the Ed Sullivan Theatre.
And speaking of Top Ten Lists, Ace has one of his own. Note the theme that runs through it of an aging host who’s lost the Zietgeist and his aging audience.
Johnny and Bob could relate.
Related: At Commentary, Peter Wehner on “Democrats and the Benighted American People.”
Dan Riehl adds, watch Letterman “go on about getting the facts right, while getting them completely wrong. It isn’t about facts at all with these people, it’s about the narrative.” Or as Lileks noted back in late 2003, “we live in an era of non-contiguous information streams. I believe one thing; someone else believes another – and the bedrock assumptions are utterly contradictory.”
Related: Another former NBC comedy vet long past his shelf-life melts down as well today: “This is not ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al.”
Nobody hates David Letterman more than himself.
Watch the show, which is a startling experience if you haven’t seen it, lately. Dave looks old and sick, like an aged relative you haven’t visted in a very long time. His presentation is halting and stammering and lost.
David Letterman doesn’t want to be on television anymore, but he’s afraid to stop. It’s incredibly sad.
Is he still on the air? If so, who would be fool enough to watch his sick humor?
Who watches? I have no idea, everyone I know has to, well, you know, like WORK the next day…Maybe that says something about the audience.Poor Rachel, she So wants to be relevant….if it just weren’t for the fact that if her viewing audience were a small town it wouldn’t be able to rate a post office…
I don’t think it’s sad at all, he’s a frikin jackass and I really wouldn’t care if he dropped dead.
Again, the Liars keep up the LIE! FOX never ran that tape until after she was fired! Facts are stubborn things Lib Liars!
The real issue was the fawning approval and affirmation by the racist attendees at sherrod’s NAACP event. those folks couldn’t get enough of Sherrod’s bigotry and racism! they Loved it!
Again, we await the video proof of the N word slur on March 20th! Still waitning liars! The NAACP falsley accused the TEA party of racism at the whitehouse’s direction for mere political gain! and they lost!
“[W]e await the video proof of the N word slur on March 20th!”
Ed Driscoll pointed out that the NY slimes issued a retraction of that BS accusation.
They may have offered a “withdrawal”…but it did not get the publicity that the first accusation did… As much as you tout something as true, you should have to tout the retraction…
Letterman appears to be an unhappy “has been”..if he was ever a “been” that is. We never liked his brand of humor.
This man does not deserve being talked about any more..anywhere..he does not deserve this type of attention….
YT, like others, knows that something was terribly wrong in the Sherrod speech, but few pundits have described its message accurately. Maddow and Letterman can add themselves to the white enablers of black nationalism as subtly communicated by Shirley Sherrod. See my blog (especially the postscript) here: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/.
As to #18 in Colorado, Breitbart had the support of the National Review Online writers, who were generally more sophisticated than other commentators in analyzing the Sherrod ideology.
Fox news was wrongly accused of talking about the Sherrod case,Fox, correctly pointed out, that it was not mentioned until late that evening in the O’Reilly show. The White House, scrambled to fire her, fearing that Beck would report on it. Someone,in the ad-min once again, acted stupidly!! Boy, were they surprised when Beck didn’t say word one! I’ve never heard an apology from the lame street media, nor have I heard from them about Shirley and her Reverend husband past abuse of black workers on their farm in 1974. It is quite a story of mistreatment, but I’m sure the White House is now aware of it.
Many months after Obama’s election his writing team could
not stop making pathetic jokes about G.W.Busch.
Frozen in time.
Warm greetings from Holland.
If not for blaming Bush for everything including the air he breathes..
Obama would have to actually admit he is a failure in doing the people’s will.
…Unfortunately, there are many on the left that voted for Obama that believe his drivel.
I am tired of his rhetoric..it’s embarassing. Time for Obama to put on his big girl panties and be the president.
I used to tune in Dave every now and then. More out of nostalga I suppose than anything else, but when five months into Obama he was still attempting George W jokes, I was out. I might flip over to catch the last segment to see if he has a good band performing that night but I’m done with Letterman.
I stopped watching The Late Show for the same reasons I stopped watching The Dialy Show with Jon Stuwart; left wing pundits and actors spewing the same tired talking points:
George Bush is an idiot! Wow, how original.
FOX News is evil! Still doing that bit?
Republicans are Nazis! Yawn.
Sarah Palin is an idiot! Nice. You updated your “George Bush is an idiot” rants.
As a longtime fan of Letterman and his career in late night, it’s sad to see him become such a bitter left leaning hack.
Bob Hope will be remembered well into the next century.
David Letterman won’t even be a trivia question in ten years.
Saturday Night Live hasn’t been funny or cool in 30 years. It should have been canceled then.
My kids don’t know who Letterman is, TYG
You’re right about SNL. That show should have died a merciful death 25 years ago. Watching it makes one squirm. Somebody is blowing somebody for that dreck to still be on the air.
You know a show is in trouble when they feel they have to make a political point rather than be FUNNY. I think political comedy is the last refuge of a bad comic. They are so desperate for a laugh, they’ll try to hit easy targets, and what easier targets are there than political figures. It’s interesting, but in the 1940s and 1950s, when there were still a lot of funny comics out there, you rarely, if ever, heard a comic make any political statements. Politics in comedy is bad business, because you’ll always offend just as many people as you get laughs from, so it’s a no-win proposition. Unless a politician does something as stupid as Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky (Clinton was the sexual gift that just kept on giving), then it gets tired and boring (and insulting) when a comic goes on a soap box and pushes a political agenda.
Not funny, Dave. But hey, don’t listen to me. Just look at your ratings. Keep this up and you’re going to get as many viewers as MSNBC does. While that might make Rachel Maddow squeal like a schoolgirl, you’ll be out of a job.
I remember the late ’70s onward pretty well. I never missed Dave in the early ’80s on NBC. Lots of the gags and bits on Late Night seemed brilliant at the time…and some were genuinely clever. But looking back on them now, I realize early, prime-cuts Letterman was to Carson what ABC’s stillborn FRIDAYS was to SNL. Those of you old enough to know what I mean, know what I mean.
“The Velcro Suit” was abdo-lutely brilliant, and hilarious! All downhill from there.
SNL? “Buckwheat Sings” and stuff like “Bass-a-matic” were great! Haven’t watched it since the original cast all left. It became un-funny amazingly quickly.
The best thing about Letterman is the closing credit, because it leads to … Craig.
David Letterman wasn’t particularly innovative. His talk show just resurrected Steve Allen’s “Tonight Show” format.
Letterman is not a man that is carrying a hell of a lot of sway except on blogs like this that have nothing better to talk about as this country goes down the tube. Who really gives a sh*t about Letterman? He is a no body and nobody should be giving him any type of press what-so-ever and that means PJ
David Letterman has passed his “sell by” date. He’s stale and sour.
Have to agree with Mustang. . . .who gives a crap about Loserman? Lets focus on real issues. . . like Kagan, November, and the perfidy of the “o”.
for every agruement there always 2 sides.and the loudest one is most often the one that is wrong. if fox allowed a video edited to prove some one guilt falsely defaming or slandering some one that wrong no matter whether it fox or any one eolse shame on you bart Simp
Don’t lose site of the fact that Rachel Maddow has grown stale and sour much quicker than even Letterman.
Believe Racial’s expiration date was about November 2008, because she’s really stinking the place up now.
It’s hard to believe, but I recall an article in “The Village Voice” from the 80s that called Letterman and Joan Rivers “Reagan’s Court Jesters.” As I recall, it had to do with the former’s ability to make ironic jokes at the expense of the “elite,” and the latter’s willingness to openly trash celebrities who’d crossed her.
How that made them tools of the Amiable Warmongering Evil Dunce was still somewhat unclear.
At one time I liked Letterman
Eventually he became one of those persons; who I would experience mixed feelings if I read about them committing suicide.
With this latest episode, he has become like Bill Moyers, Garrison Keilor, Chris Matthews, and Jimmy Carter, i.e. their would be no mixed feelings.
David who…?
I agree that Letterman is stale and has been for years. However, Breitbart is a classless act. Bill O’Reilly apologized profusely on his show when the truth came out. What has Breitbart done?
I totally agree.
You can be sure it will be a cold day before anyone at FOX takes a partial tape at face value. It was a stupid move. The other networks try to make something of it as their ratings are much much lower than FOX.
Also, was Breitbart fed this tape by a “leftest do gooder” and he fell??
Also, Sherrod, despite her protests, is notnotnot someone that does nOT know her way around the legal world..look at her last lawsuit the Pigford case.
However, I think people are now taking a closer look at Sherrod because of Breitbart. It seems to be a good idea.
AND, Dave Letterman is a tired, beyond his time, trying to act cool goof. Many older comedians are great , he’s just embarrassing.
Dave and his Late Night arrived at a propitious time. The VCR was coming into widespead use. You could tape Dave and not have to stay awake until 1:30 A.M. to watch live. He and his staff were like nothing else on late night talk shows. Not Steve Allen, not Johnny. Nothing. Sure, Dave stood on their shoulders. But he took the format in a new way that was consistently hilarious and edgy. Truly “must see TV.”
Then, eventually Dave became like all the rest of us. He got old and stale. And somewhere he took a devastatingly wrong turn. My guess is that 1)He grew envious of the left-wing “cable comics,” Stewart, Colbert, et.al., who began to eat into his audience with their hipness and leftwing rants and 2)The influence of his “squeeze” and now-wife Regina, a refugee from SNL’s staff. A man who once was proud to have Bob Dole and John McCain on his show and honored them for their sacrifices for our country and did a couple of USO Christmas tours for our troops (!)suddenly turned against all that. He became sour, substantially unfunny and biased. No jokes about the incompetence of Barack Obama and his administration after two years! Still mining the dry hole of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin.
Dave Letterman has lost his way. At age 63 he is never going to find it again. He says that the birth of his son, Harry, “opened his heart and let the world in.” Maybe. But the humor seems to have gone out. A shame because he was once great and innovative. I still watch the show from time-to-time. But through the wonderment of DVR technology, the second Dave mentions “Palin” or “Bush” in his monologue or has Rachel Maddow walk out as a guest, I hit the the fast forward button and am spared his pedantic drivel. Too bad, because there was once a TV comic genuis there that was a joy for everyone to watch all the time.
Steve B/COLORADO:
Why should Breitbart apologize? For what? Firstly the entire point of publishing the clip was to demonstrate the crowd reaction by an NAACP that had just branded the Tea-Party protesters “racist” as they reacted approvingly to what they believed to be a racist statement by a fellow black about how she got her revenge on whites. Note that the crowd reaction happened BEFORE they realized the speaker was turning it into a “lessons learned” tale. Secondly, Breitbart did NOT edit the clip. It was a partial clip supplied to him. Third, even that partial clip contained the non-racist statements of the speaker, proving that Breitbart made no attempt to artificially spin her statements. And finally, I would point out that the NAACP, which had the BOTH the ENTIRE transcript of the speech as well as ALL the tape footage in its exclusive possession, hastily published a statement apologizing for the speakers “racist” statements PRIOR to Fox news’ commentary. Why would they do so? Perhaps you should read the entire transcript..
Virgil: I believe it’s called doing one’s background research. Bill O’Reilly has a good reputation for usually doing his homework. Some of the other commentators and bloggers just spout off whatever enters their small minds. I’ll note that the “small-mindedness” is not confined to the right wing either.
O’Reilly sure got the Swift Boat Veterans bass ackward, he was practically maligning them to get Kerry to the table. It’s when he lost me.
Agreed, Virgil.
The evolution of Letterman into “Johnny One Note” has been going on for some time.
Are the foibles of the Republicans, individual or collective, a legitimate target? You bet.
But when you limit yourself to that when there are so many other things out there that are funny–like a certain ex-college professor who just can’t shut up–then you become something like a Jew baiter in Nazi Germany.
The thing that I never liked about Letterman was the way he treated “nobodies” vs. the way he treated “important people.” He’d have some 8 year old kid on his show with something stupid like a potato chip collection, followed by a Hollywood big shot wit a new movie. He would make vicious fun of the kid but he’d kiss up to the Hollywood big shot.
That always struck me as an indication of bad character.
Actually, Letterman pretty much treated Hollywood celebrities with contempt during his time with NBC. Thus, a lot of them wouldn’t come on his show because he refused to ooh and aww over their latest movie fiasco or whatever. And you were really in trouble if you got on the show and didn’t “perform” as a Hollywood celebrity. Letterman made it well known that he wanted his guests to be entertaining. Have great anectdotes, be engaged and upbeat. If you came on and sat in the guest chair like a lump and said “Here’s my clip,” we was merciless. And that in itself was entertaining, watching the stuffed shirts get theirs!
As for kids, the early Dave was pretty cool with them, too. For some reason I have never forgotten one Rocky Morabito. Rocky was five years old. Climbed on top of the refrigerator to get the car keys. Buckled his sister in the child seat. Jerry-rigged something so he could reach the brake and gas pedals. And took his sister for a ride! Police pulled him over and he executed that perfectly. Hilarious. But, alas, that was the Dave Letterman of bygone days.
An Old Dave Fan,
I remember that. His mother was asleep and his little sister wanted to go to the beach.
I was big Letterman fan back then.
Trio did reruns of some of his shows years ago and one was when Late Night covered the election for student body president, for a junior high school, over a course of a week. At the time I was in junior high school and most of the humor in it was at of reach for me then and remember thinking what the hell. But it is probably one of the funniest things from his old show that stands the test of time. Some of the things that were hilarious for me back then: not so much now. Which isn’t a surprise even though I still have a pretty juvenile sense of humor.
Look on http//:www.youtube.com for is many interviews with Teri Garr which still have their charm and humor intact after all these years.
RIP Funny and not too bitter Dave
Definitely someone who could benefit from going to see a therapist. I think he still as issues over losing his father when he was, I think, in his senior year of high school.
Breitbart is the poster boy for the frothing, lying, racist, disgusting right wing media. He deserves all the contempt he has earned.
Right wing???? you need to rethink and relook…
Since he has earned none by his exposé of the frothing, lying, racist, disgusting Sherrods and NAACP — not to mention the uneducated, incompetent, racist, pathetic Barry Dunham and his corrupt, thuggish, oligarchic, Marxist puppeteers — but very much the opposite, I heartily agree with you, Jimmy.
Gosh . . . you’re really clueless about Breitbart aren’t you. Just spitting out lefty, douchebag talking points. Very entertaining. You should get a talk show.
James is just a poster child for the Pavlovian lunacy that pervades the ossified echo chamber gated community of the mind that the “reality-based community” has become.
The screeching howls have taken on an increasingly psychotic and panicked tone over the last 18 months as the cocoon that envelops their schizoid utopia is shredded like a tissue by the harsh and cruel winds from the hurricane that is brewing in The Real World.
The denizens of the “reality-based community” think that if they scream, screech and stomp their feet loud enough the mantras of their leftist/liberal/”progressive” cargo cult it will stop The Real World from ruining their little utopia. All their actions are serving to do is to ensure that the storm that is coming will blow away and destroy their little community and themselves. All that will be left will be the devastated ruins and a few bones for archeologists and historians to dig up, study and display as an example of what happens when a society allows a malicious cancer within it’s body to grow instead of nipping it in the bud before it becomes destructive.
I’m proud to say I never liked Letterman. I never thought he was funny even when he was new and “edgy”. Letterman is simply not funny and he is even LESS funny lately. These late night talk show goofs are all liberals. Leno’s writers once in a while come up with a good line but usually the material is obvious, cookie cutter stuff.
“what’s the best thing you hear on Letterman?” “Coming up next…Craig Ferguson.”
Craig Ferguson is the only one of these light night goofs that’s even vaguely clever or funny. Letterman is just an old, bitter, irrelevant and tiresome leftie. Idiot college kids thought he was hip and hilarious 25 years ago. These were the same kids who thought R.E.M. was a great band.
In the end, there has been a little justice: Dave was passed over, not once, but twice for his dream job of the Tonight Show.
Leno’s jokes, as Dr. Dave says above, are cookie-cutter, but his delivery far surpasses Dave’s. No bitterness seeping through with Jay.
Letterman has sadly become a one-trick pony. No edgy humor anymore, just meanness towards the right. Jay can at least carry on a decent conversation with a conservative. Letterman doesn’t even bother booking them, in part, b/c they wouldn’t come on even if he wanted them to. Sarah Palin had the best line, “I’m not going on there & boosting his ratings.”
I was glad when Leno came back and I bet that Letterman was not. He has taken on the wrong cause. Again! He brings in to question the integrity of Breitbart and thanks to Zombie at Pajamas Media we all know that Ms. Sherrod has no integrity and if anyone from the Justice Department is ever hired that has morals she will probably be found criminally liable in the money handed out to black farmers that never grew one tomato plant. At least he didn’t quip about having a baseball player raping an underage girl. That is so passe with the mainstream elite.
David who?
“Lettermen”; Yea; I remember them. They had some great songs back in the ’80′s.
They shoulda started a late night talk show.
The david letterman show has become entertainment for no one other than David Letterman himself.
He sure does appreciate sick humor.
For some reason, I never thought Letterman was funny even when he was new and everybody thought he was hilarious.
The only thing I thought was funny about his show was the Top 10 List.
You are being unfair to Letterman. He isn’t really an ultra-leftist, anti-American hack. My bet is that the NYC media has threatened him with full disclosure of his exploits if he didn’t talk garbage. I have no idea what those exploits might be but I’d be surprised if they only involved female interns.
Poor Johnny’s spinning in his grave. Dave’s taken a great comic tradition and ruined it.
Pitiful.
I think it was Chris Wallace who inteviewed Howie (Duh) Dean. I, too, was a Letterman fan but it only lasted while he was on daytime decades ago. . . then his routines and
his face started looking as old as MAD magazine. BORING and classless like all the rest of the leftists calling themselves ‘entertainers.’ I don’t think so. . .
I remember an episode of “Days and Nights Of Molly Dodd” in which the Blair Brown did a voice-over in which she said that she decided not to stay up and watch David Letterman humiliate another guest.
The Letterman people responded by denying that Dave humiliates his guests.
He was cranky 20 years ago.
Why do you even pay attention to him any more? I mean, if it wasn’t for bloggers tuning in to find something to blog about, his audience would be about half as large. The show is totally irrelevant.
Does Dave deny he caused Cindy Crawford to burst into tears when he tore into her about wearing too much makeup? I was shocked the NOW gals let him get away with that foreshadowing of his workplace misogyny, but then again if you’re a lefty you can’t be misogynist.
Let liberls like Letterman turn Andrew Breitbart into a household name. He’ll use the publicity to his advantage and make mincemeat out of them.
The difference between Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh is that Rush focuses on his own audience and his own views. He is demonized because he has built such a large audience and, therefore poses a threat to liberals. While Breitbart’s whole operation focuses on creating opportunities to spar with our liberal pop culture establishment and expose it for what it is. Rush is all about talking. Breitbart is all about scandals and political theatre. He knows exactly what he’s doing. These liberal idiots have no clue.
I saw that interview myself. Or at least the first part. They had me talking back to the TV again!
The funniest thing was that Maddow had just finished a long self-congratulatory boast about how basically, while she does analyze the news, you can take every one of her facts to the bank. She’s not like that Faux News, by golly, since Maddow is fact-based. Nothing but the facts for her. You can fact check her all day. Every fact out of her mouth is chock full of factness.
And then, not 30 seconds later, she’s got the whole Sherrod affair completely and unequivocally wrong.
It was a pretty stunning display.
The other thing I thought was telling was that Letterman mentioned that he regularly watched Maddow, and proved it with a comment about her frequent guest host. I think it says a lot that Letterman belongs to the set of regular watchers of Rachel Maddow. That’s got to be a fairly leftist group. A small group to be sure. But certainly reliably lefty.
Just to be clear: I think BOR is a loudmouthed self-aggrandizing buffoon.
But Letterman’s boorish behavior made BOR look like a gentleman by comparison, and I wrote NBC and told them so.
I thank David Letterman for the last three Warren Zevon albums, which might well not all have been recorded without his support. And for that last unforgettable hour with Zevon. And that’s about it, no reason to watch him now.
Late night TV has not been the same since Johnny Carson retired.
Poor David, his fact checkers failed him totally on this show, then added insult to injury by not cluing him in, that he absolutely was not going to add Madcow to his trophy list, poor sad little man struck out all around, accuracy, delivery, and scoring.
Dave lost me in 1996 , during the election between Clinton / Dole. He’d have Dole on and treat him very well. But when Dole was not a guest, Dave would say day after day , the wost jokes, and slurs agaisnt Dole.
I’m a conservative, I expect to take hits from ‘entertainers” , that’s fine. but Dave just took things too far.
I’ll admit I wasn’t the bigest Dole Man, but he wasn’t clinton, and that was goodenough.
I eventualy tuned out till after the election, but dave just wouldn’t let it go. So I did. I had ben there from ep 1, misssing shows in the mid 80′s becuase of bad reception where i lived. but i had to stop watching hiss sow or shoot my tv.
I tried to tune in when he had people i liked on, but i just couldn’t put up with him anymore. and don’t. i’m much happier now..
MadCow & Lierman = BORING. SHERROD IS A RACIST RACE-BATER & A THIEF.
Fox News’s “Red Eye” is more cutting edge than Letterman. I used to love Dave’s off-the-wall late night pranks, but his monologue was never funny. The Top Ten List is the only worthwhile part of his show, but it’s not worth the trouble to read anymore.
I’ve never been a Letterman fan. After watching him a few times in the beginning I concluded that his whole ‘hipper than thou’ pose showed that he held his audience in contempt. He was just too cool for the room.
dave who?